WVU's John Hu is leading a team that includes Debangsu Bhattacharyya and Hanjing Tian to investigate ways to convert stranded gas resources into value-added liquid products to reduce demand for crude oil.

Researchers at West Virginia
University have had a long and successful working relationship with their
colleagues from the National Energy Technology Laboratory. Thanks to a
four-year award from the Rapid
Advancement in Process Intensification Deployment Manufacturing Institute,
that relationship will continue.

“The technologies
developed in this project will utilize shale gas as feedstock to produce
aromatics, C2-C4 olefins and hydrogen, which are key chemical intermediates for
polymers and specialty chemicals,” Hu said. “The technologies for shale gas
conversion are more cost effective and environmentally benign than those used
in commercial processes based on petroleum or other conventional gas-to-liquid
technologies.”

Late last year, WVU
became a partner in RAPID, which focuses on using advanced manufacturing to
develop breakthrough technologies to boost the productivity and efficiency of
some of industrial processes by 20 percent in the next five years. The effort
is overseen by the U.S. Department of Energy in conjunction with the American
Institute for Chemical Engineering.

A few weeks later, WVU was awarded
a $1.25 million grant from the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy
to develop technologies for converting electrical energy from renewable
resources into energy-dense carbon-neutral liquid fuels – that is, fuels that
do not increase carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. NETL is a partner on that
award as well.

With this new award, the WVU-led
team will combine NETL’s capabilities and prior work with the University of
Pittsburgh’s catalysis expertise and Shell’s industrial experience and success
to advance the technology resulting in an integrated pilot test. Shell is
providing a $1 million match for the scale-up activity.

“The University of Pittsburgh will
develop catalytic materials that will be integrated into the microwave reactor
that is being designed and built by WVU and NETL,” Hu said. “Shell will bring
process and reactor modeling capability, engineering scale-up and commercial
demonstration expertise to the project.”

Through the use of microwave plasma catalysis, which enables
long-term energy storage and long-distance renewable energy delivery from
remote, isolated and stranded locations, initial projections by Hu and his team
shows that the potential impact of
the technology could improve energy efficiency by about 63 percent, reduce
capital expenditures by 51 percent and increase energy productivity.

Current indirect natural gas conversion to chemicals approaches using
traditional product refining is capital intensive and less energy efficient
compared the potential use of microwave catalysis that can increase product
yields.

NETL’s Dushyant Shekhawat, who helped develop the microwave approach, said
that researchers are optimistic that in addition to on-site conversion, the
process could also be applied to traditional large-scale natural gas conversion
plants and eliminate some unit operations currently required to accomplish the
same results. He added that, “Microwave upgrading of fossil fuels has been an
active research area at NETL.”

Shekhawat, along with NETL colleague, Dave Berry, will be responsible for
process and microwave reactor scale-up. Joining Hu as co-principal
investigators on the project are Debangsu
Bhattacharyya and Hanjing
Tian with the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering.